Thursday, February 14, 2013

Never Again – Holocaust Memorial Day event

The London Klezmer Quartet

By
New Worker Correspondent

AMNESTY
International and the Waltham Forest section of Unite Against Fascism (UAF)
joined forces last Wednesday evening to host a Holocaust Memorial Day event with
speakers, a film, music and debate, in Hackney, to commemorate Holocaust
Memorial Day.

Speakers included Holocaust Survivor
Mala Tribich, Sandar Szoke from the Hungarian (Anti-fascist Movement, Roma
Civil Rights Movement and son of Holocaust survivors), David Rosenberg (author
of The Battle of the East End), Dan
Jones (Amnesty International), Natasha Munoz, Father Steven Saxby and Weyman
Bennett of the UAF.

The event was opened by Dan Jones Amnesty
International and chaired by David Rosenberg.

Mala Tribich gave an account of her early
life, in which she experienced her family being forced to live in a ghetto and
then being forced into a concentration camp.

Mala Tribich was born in Poland in 1930 and is
the sister of Olympic medallist Ben Helfgott – the only members of their
immediate family to survive. During the occupation, her parents moved her and a
cousin to a Catholic family. But they were so homesick they asked to return to
the ghetto.

One day they were taken to a row of
lorries at an unknown destination. But Mrs Tribich, then 12, showed incredible
chutzpah: she asked an SS officer if she and her cousin Hania, who was five,
could return to the ghetto. Amazingly, the officer said yes.

She survived two death camps and was
reunited with her brother several years after the war. In Britain, she met and
married Maurice Tribich, completed a degree in sociology and raised two
children.

Sandor Szoke gave an account of the
situation in Hungary, Rumania and the rise of fascism and anti-Semitism.

This was followed by a question and answer
session chaired by David Rosenberg, author and Jewish socialist.

Natasha Munoz from We Are Waltham Forest spoke
about the positivity and raised morale in Waltham Forest after We Are Waltham
Forest successfully blocked a march by the Islamophobic English Defence League.

Father
Steve Saxby, who works with Walthamstow Immigration Centre, spoke on
multicultural diversity and the problems of isolation and loneliness for
immigrants in Britain.

Weyman Bennett, leader of the UAF warned that,
in spite of a year of victories against the EDL and other fascist
organisations, we should not be complacent but must still come out on the
streets to oppose EDL and other racist and fascist scum.